Challenges Ahead for Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity
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In a previous article I attempted to define Pentecostal-Charismatic (P-C) Christianity to set the context for an articulation of the challenges it will face in the future. I defined the movement as a distinct family in Christianity with three core features: a non-conformist tradition, a spiritual tradition, and a renewal and missional tradition. Even though there remains a lot of diversity within the global movement, this core helps to pinpoint the challenges that P-C Christians face as they move forward into the third millennium.
While much more could be said, there are three overarching challenges that relate to the global movement. I describe them as overarching to reinforce the fact that I am applying them broadly to a large and diverse movement. This does not mean that every part of P-C Christianity will deal directly with them. Since P-C Christianity is a family of networks, every part of the movement will be impacted by them. What happens in one part of the movement invariably seeps into other parts.
The three challenges are prioritizing prosperity and political reform, privileging private revelation and the prophetic, and promoting other traditions rather than drinking from our own wells.
Prioritizing Prosperity and Political Reform
Almost since the beginning of the movement, P-C Christianity has wrestled with the challenge of prosperity. There are a number of reasons for this: the emphasis on salvation as a present reality that concerns bodies and souls, the translation of Wesleyan optimistic grace into the language of victory, and the desire for ongoing encounters with God as the fuel of holy love. In P-C Christianity, prosperity is not simply material blessings, but the full participation in God’s purpose and plan. It is this that motivates the language of “I’m blessed.”
The problem is less the emphasis on divine blessing, properly understood, than the way in which this language becomes wedded to cultural notions of success. The prosperity gospel is the most obvious example of how this happens as ideas of material wealth, physical health, or secular notions of self-help and success inform the meaning of “good news.”
The more extreme version that Kate Bowler calls “hard prosperity” reduces Christianity to a transaction with God and faith as the formula that unlocks the transaction. It took root through a bastardized version of forensic justification where faith immediately unlocks the promises of God in Christ so that the person is now declared to be righteous. Within this juridical schema, covenant becomes a contract that God must fulfill upon meeting the conditions.
Since Christ completed salvation on the cross, the final condition that unlocks this salvation is faith. The logic implies, “If faith brings the promise of justification, why not other promises?” The older “name it and claim it” motif highlights this mechanistic approach to faith. For Kenneth Copeland, faith is the power that unlocks the spiritual laws found in scripture as concrete expressions of covenant. Faith is a force that releases the power of covenant in positive confession. While many have abandoned the older language, the transactional view of salvation as a finished work unlocked by faith remains. It’s a very modern notion where faith becomes formulaic and mechanistic, almost like a magical incantation that transmits heavenly blessings.
Yet there are two more subtle versions of prosperity that tempt P-C Christians. The first stems from the new push toward realizing heaven on earth. One finds this most clearly in networks associated with Neocharismatic Christianity. These networks have sometimes been called the New Apostolic Reformation because of the focus on apostles and prophets. Prosperity takes its cue from the Reformed focus on cultural spheres through the language of the seven-mountain mandate. One brings heaven to earth through the transformation of these cultural spheres that, in turn, unleash economic prosperity in society. The turn toward the political by figures such as Che Ahn and Lance Wallnau has to do with securing political and cultural power to bring about top-down reform as part of the realization of the kingdom. Recently, Wallnau happily declared himself a Christian nationalist wedding revival to political rallies as the means to propagate the gospel.
It’s a conservative version of social gospel fueled by a continuous flow of prophetic words that both identify and unleash divine promise. The division between the hard right and the hard left within Christianity is in reality a fight among two types of political orders, both of which fundamentally agree on aligning the gospel with politics. The recent chanting in John Hagee’s church of the euphemism “Let’s Go Brandon” by the attendees at the “ReAwaken America” conference reveals how far some on the right have pushed the connection. One can only hope that Matt Hagee’s regret over the conference will mean a real change of mind at the core of repentance.
What remains crucial in this conservative politicizing of the gospel is getting the proper formula for reform correct, which is what partly fuels the need for ongoing prophecy. In other words, salvation remains firmly planted in a transactional and juridical framework. Modern prophets attempt to inform the church about political figures and movements as a way of getting everything in place to bring about social reform. If one can balance the formula of the church’s restoration correctly (hence the need for restored apostles and prophets), then the church can complete its mission.
Within this framework, premillennialism and postmillennialism flow together because what unites both perspectives is the P-C focus on bringing about the kingdom through spiritual conquest and victorious living. The question of rapture is less important than the movement into a millennial reign on earth as the extension of victorious living and full-gospel prosperity through proper aligning of faith and the structures of the church.
While the temptation to political reform as the mechanism to bring about the kingdom looms large in certain sectors of Neocharismatic Christianity, the entire movement continues to wrestle with the temptation toward the cultural and the political. What I mean is what the historian Donald Dayton described as embourgeoisement, that is, the quest for upward social mobility and the cultural capital and influence that comes from this mobility. Methodism found itself at this very point in the 1890s when William McKinley became president. P-C Christianity found itself at the same point in the early twenty-first century, which partly accounts for the strong support of Trump as “God’s candidate.”
The issue is not whether P-C Christians should engage the political process, hold political office, or even possess wealth. The issue is how theologically one prioritizes these matters. They should never become part of the mission of the church nor should they be the goal of Christian existence. The church should not see success in terms of political or cultural capital, but in terms of its mission to proclaim the gospel in word and deed. This is why a recovery of the mission to spread scriptural holiness remains crucial as a tonic against the temptation to prioritize social mobility and the political power of culture over against the power of the gospel.
Privileging Private Revelation and the Prophetic
The twin emphases on non-conformity and the charismatic makes P-C Christianity particularly susceptible to charismania: the proliferation of prophetic words and pronouncements such that the private revelation of the Spirit becomes the dominant way to hear the voice of God.
The problem is not the desire to hear from God, but how these “personal words” function as the primary vehicle of divine truth so that a pastor can divorce and remarry multiple times, bankrupt a ministry, embezzle funds, and wreak havoc on congregants through broken promises and failed prophecies. Yet, the pastor can still claim to be the mouthpiece of God.
In light of the emphasis on non-conformity, the privileging of the prophetic means that the prophet rarely needs to submit to the body of Christ. Instead, the prophet stands apart as a kind of non-conformist forging his or her own ministry as the natural extension of the prophetic vocation. The effect has been ongoing fracturing and fragmentation, as every individual now claims the right to “come out” from this denomination or that network and forge a new independent ministry free from the constraints of the community of faith. I have seen P-C ministers repeatedly leave existing denominational or network structures because “God said,” as though God is constantly invested in schism in the body.
There is a fundamental failure to see that every schism is a laceration in the body of Christ. The scars from the whips of the Roman soldiers continue to be formed as P-C ministers sever Christ’s hands and limbs in the service of their own calling. Part of the failure here is due to an over-spiritualization of the church as though it is simply an invisible institution. On this more gnostic view, visible separation does not harm the invisible body. This does not preclude that schism may be a tragic necessity, but among P-C Christians it is not only practiced with regularity, it has become the new normal as a way of reinforcing the independence of the prophetic vocation.
This approach represents another way modernity has invaded P-C Christianity. Under the influence of notions of autonomy, the non-conformist impulse has now become the authority of the individual over against the community. Initially, this impulse was a form of resistance to Christianity established by the state and backed by civil law. It also meant a resistance to worship that was prescribed and formal. Today, however, the prophetic dimension has become the assertion of individual autonomy over the household of God. Rather than the community of faith discerning together the voice of prophecy, the individual has become the arbiter of revelation.
Alongside the fusion of individual autonomy and the prophetic is the new relationship between the entrepreneurial and success. The proliferation of so many independent ministries with their own legal status (501-C3 organizations in the United States) subtly introduces business models into ideas about the church. Taken to extremes it means that the church becomes no more than any other business with the signs of success being growth in numbers and finances that eventually allow for franchising to occur.
There can be no genuinely independent Christian ministry. Such a ministry is antithetical to the communal nature of Christianity grounded in the triune nature of God and reflected in the relationality intrinsic to the image of God as male and female. How can one talk about the church as the temple of the Spirit, the body of Christ, and the household of God and yet operate a ministry that has no formal connections to other Christians? By “formal” I mean part of a relational and authoritative fellowship, not just personal friendships that tie ministers together.
It is a deep irony that some P-C ministers want to present themselves as prophetic voices with authority and yet resist forms of authority over them. This is a constant temptation for the movement as a whole. Modern Christians sometimes forget that one set of criteria for determining authentic prophecy was communal. Did the prophet honor the community in concrete ways by submitting to the community? This was ultimately the point behind the Didache claiming that any prophet who seeks money or abuses the hospitality of Christians is deemed to be false by virtue of those actions.
If P-C Christianity is a distinct tradition, then it must maintain structures of authority that privilege the public teaching of the church as its communal discernment. This does not require a commitment to a denominational structure. It does, however, require some commitment to a network that possesses authoritative weight in which the community can say to the individual prophet or pastor that he or she must retract, or even step down in the case of serious moral failures. Leaders who fail to submit their own ministries to structures of authority should not claim to be authorities over others. Authority in the New Testament involves the plurality of the community, exemplified in the council of Acts 15.
Promoting Other Traditions
The final challenge for P-C Christianity relates to its being a spiritual tradition rather than a confessional one. The emphasis on power and purity within a spirituality means that P-C Christians have been susceptible to influence from a variety of Christian traditions, sometimes to the detriment of the movement as a whole.
In the United States, P-C Christianity stands between evangelicalism and fundamentalism on the right and mainline Protestantism on the left. Its doctrinal commitments place it firmly within traditional Christianity in a way that pushes toward confessionalism, and yet its commitment to holy love in the context of charismatic existence pushes it toward experience and moralism. The temptation is to move too far in one direction or another.
While this has been the general temptation, the more specific problem is the way P-C Christianity has adopted forms of evangelicalism antithetical to its own existence. It absorbed the schism between fundamentalism and modernism even though both fundamentalists and mainline Protestants rejected P-C Christians for the first thirty-five years of the movement’s existence.
It is no mistake that the prosperity gospel emerged primarily from the teachings of E. W. Kenyon, a Baptist from the northeast. It was Kenyon who saw in the juridical model underlying forensic justification a basis for transactional thinking, which he then aligned with faith as mind cure. This mechanistic view worked against the more organic and synergistic understanding of salvation inherited from the Wesleyanism that gave rise to the global P-C movement.
The importation of ideas from the broader evangelical movement has, on the whole, had a negative effect on P-C Christianity. It has led to a continuous debate over women in ministry and to the introduction of worldview thinking with its extension of confessionalism over every area and the literalistic interpretation of scripture that tends to accompany it. More recently, it has meant the introduction of political reform as the means of revival through the sphere sovereignty of the seven mountains.
Finally, it has led to the introduction of evangelism models that have more to do with marketing the church than the power of the Spirit. For this reason, P-C Christians are witnessing a dilution of spiritual distinctives like baptism in the Spirit in the same way that holiness churches slowly lost sight of sanctification.
What is needed is to return to the Wesleyan spring out of which P-C Christianity emerged. To do so would allow for a recovery of the vision of William Seymour, who saw the unity of the faith in the power of the blood of Christ to sanctify and the Spirit of Christ to empower. Racial reconciliation, women in ministry, and missional activism through orphanages or healing homes all stem from this Wesleyan Pentecostal vision.
Healing of the body went together with the social mission to feed, clothe, and care for the least of these. These distinctives are being called into question by some P-C Christians who have been formed and shaped by the broader evangelical world. Talk about women as bishops or the need to overcome racism grounded in the vision of Pentecost has become, in the minds of those influenced by evangelical rhetoric, the importation of feminism, social activism, or other forms of perceived liberalism. In point of fact, it is authentic P-C Christianity and has always been so.
Vinson Synan called the twentieth century the century of the Holy Spirit. P-C Christianity has grown through its emphasis on the Spirit and its vision of Pentecost as central to the mission of the church. The temptations I have outlined linger like a dormant virus that breaks out over and over again and threatens the entire body.
True to my own Pentecostalism, I remain optimistic about the future not because P-C Christians are better, but because the Spirit continues to renew the church. Part of this renewal now means that P-C Christianity must face these challenges so that it does not become yet another form of the very cultural Christianity it fought so hard to overcome.
Dr. Dale M. Coulter is Professor of Historical Theology at Pentecostal Theological Seminary. He also serves on the Editorial Board for Firebrand.